by David Riggs
Melpomene was a shrewd critic. As co-author of Gorboduc, the first English play written in blank verse, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, had the right metre for an English translation of Lucan. The jangling rhymes of Turberville’s drawn-out couplets undermined the vivid descriptions that drew Lucan’s audience into the thick of the action. Blank verse was a better choice. Dame Tragedy ascribes Buckhurst’s poetic talent to his noble nature. The Muses all attended at his birth; she herself inspires him with ‘words at will’. Conversely, a mere craftsman like Turberville should never aspire to speak in Lucan’s voice: ‘Not every dick that dares to draw / A sword is Hector’s peer.’ Turberville is just a random specimen of humanity (as in ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’). In abandoning his projected translation, Turberville concedes that his pen is ‘too plain, with metre meet / to furnish Lucan’s style’. But Buckhurst never carried out this task; Melpomene’s intervention put the brakes on an English translation of Lucan.
The assertion that only an aristocrat like Lord Buckhurst could write English blank verse posed a challenge to Marlowe, the poor scholar who already possessed ‘metre meet / To furnish Lucan’s style’. The hallmark of that style, ‘the enterprises and battles’ which are so lifelike that ‘you imagine them not related but acted’, conveyed more than a pleasurable illusion of presence. They were prophetic of battles yet to come. Lucan mobilized the rhetoric of vivid description on behalf of oppositional politics. Reimagining the civil war was his way of keeping the Republican cause alive in the present. For ‘when the story of the battle is read,’ Lucan hoped, it ‘will elicit hope and fear together with unanswered prayers; and all, amazed, will read of them as if they were still to come and not past, and will side with you, Pompey.’
After the death of Pompey, the last great Republican military commander, Lucan proclaims that ‘the struggle which we always have with us will be between Freedom and Caesarism.’ Although humanists tried to make him into an anti-war poet, Lucan frequently suggests that it is better to persist in the violent struggle for liberty. At the close of Book One, which also marks the end of Marlowe’s translation, the astrologer Nigidius Figulus hyperbolically entreats the gods to send endless conflict:
Many a year these furious broils let last;
Why should we wish the gods should ever end them?
War only gives us peace. O Rome, continue
The course of mischief, and stretch out the date
Of slaughter; only civil broils make peace.
(667–71)
If the Aeneid is about the creation of the Roman empire, the Civil Wars looks toward its destruction. Where Virgil, like Spenser, harks back to the legendary origins of the empire, Lucan focuses on recent political history and its consequences. He replaces the Olympian gods and goddesses who sanction the triumph of the Roman empire with the fickle goddess of Fortune. Writing rapidly, and under a virtual death sentence, Lucan portrays a world governed by accident, where radically contingent events destabilize the master-narrative of the imperial regime.
As the great Republican poet in the epic tradition, Lucan addressed his work to the Roman counterparts of Northumberland and Strange. Although the Republicans had lost the Roman civil war, Lucan contrives to put the final outcome of that epic conflict in suspense. He urges his readers to carry the struggle between liberty and Caesarism into the present; he insists on the radical contingency of historical events. At the level of narrative strategy Lucan’s periodic digressions defer and disable any linear movement towards a fixed outcome. Marlowe’s revision of the Hero and Leander story obeys the same logic. His narrator actively resists any interpretation that would predetermine the outcome of his story; in the end, nobody dies. By way of comparison, recall the red-hot poker that never finds its way into the executioner’s hands in Act Five of Edward II; or the mutilated body that never appears at the end of Dr Faustus. Marlowe shared Lucan’s commitment to a narrative strategy of ongoing deferral.
Thomas Walsingham’s manor house was an excellent place to meditate on this theme, but the walls of Marlowe’s privacy were wearing thin. On 8 December, Henry Chettle entered a new pamphlet called Kind-Heart’s Dream on the Stationers’ Register. Chettle’s prefatory letter ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ reopened the question of Marlowe’s atheism. Chettle had learned that two of the writers attacked in The Groatsworth of Wit (Marlowe and Shakespeare) took offence at the publication of Greene’s remarks about them. Chettle’s first response is to distance himself from the atheist: ‘With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them [Marlowe] I care not if I never be.’ After making fulsome amends to Shakespeare (‘my self have seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes’), Chettle returns to Marlowe:
For the first, whose learning I reverence, and at the perusing of Greenes Book, struck out what then in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ: or had it been true, yet to publish it, was intolerable: him I would wish to use me no worse than I deserve.
Chettle appears to be saying that he struck out the most scandalous of the accusations that Greene had levelled at Marlowe. The excised passage presumably contained the substance of Marlowe’s ‘diabolical atheism’; had Chettle published any material of this sort, he would have been subject to criminal prosecution. These disclaimers sound ominous. Chettle does not know Marlowe, but he knows that he wants nothing to do with him.
* * *
With the remission of the plague, playing resumed on 29 December 1592. About a month later, on 26 January 1593, Strange’s Men performed Marlowe’s last play, The Massacre at Paris. Henslowe identified it as a new work, one that the company had not performed before. The earliest edition of The Massacre, and the source of all subsequent printings, appeared a decade or so later. The text looks compressed and improvisatory. It is about half as long as the Tamburlaine plays, The Few of Malta and Edward II. Only one speech, the Duke of Guise’s soliloquy on his grand designs, runs to more than thirty lines. The metre often sounds clumsy and the imagery sometimes feels confused. Lines, and sets of lines, are carelessly repeated. When the Queen Mother rouses herself to kill her younger son, she recycles the soliloquy she had used when preparing to poison her older one. The text contains phrases, lines and speeches that crop up in Edward II, and in Parts Two and Three of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. The pace is exceedingly rapid. Two hundred and fifty speeches consist of only one or two lines.
These are the hallmarks of a memorial reconstruction, a text prepared from one or more of the players’ recollection of a performance. What actually happened to Marlowe’s work is hard to say, but a plausible scenario would go like this: Strange’s Men went through several amalgamations and dispersals in the early 1590s. Suppose that one branch of the company toured the provinces, while Edward Alleyn, who played the Guise and, as principal sharer, owned The Massacre, remained in London. The touring players would have had to reconstruct the original script from memory. The publisher eventually assigned The Massacre to the Admiral’s Men, a company that had co-performed with Strange’s Men before they went on tour. The pejorative stereotype of the ‘bad’ quarto, with its overtones of piracy, corruption, theft and impoverishment, puts The Massacre at an unfair disadvantage. Memorial reconstruction is a selective process. The reported text contains what the actors found to be the most memorable parts of Marlowe’s Massacre.
Marlowe’s subject matter – the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and the murderous quarrel between the Duke of Guise and King Henri III in 1586–88 – focused attention on the spread of religious warfare. The play depicts twenty killings, one for every sixty-three lines; the shortened version intensifies the staccato effect of its violence. The players recalled Marlowe’s fine touches of sadism and brutality. They remembered that the Guise stamps on the lifeless body of Admiral Coligny, the most prominent Protestant martyr, and sends his head to the Pope. They preserved the passage where King Henri III summons the Guise’s son to view his father’s newly butchered
corpse. Although The Massacre has been faulted for crude sensationalism, Marlowe stays very close to the historical record. The play is a documentary. Virtually every incident in it has either been traced back to a published source, or was common knowledge in diplomatic circles. The freight of verifiable fact looms especially large in a text that runs to just over fifteen hundred lines. The travelling players who performed it were Hamlet’s ‘abstract and brief chronicle of the times’. They carried out Marlowe’s intention to set the most shocking aspects of the French religious wars before English theatregoers.
Within a matter of minutes, the Guise provides poisoned gloves for the Old Queen of Navarre, hires an assassin to shoot Admiral Coligny, instructs his accomplices to wear white crosses (the insignia of religious purity) and personally finishes off the Admiral and the Protestant preacher Loreine. If his victims said anything memorable during their final moments, the players forgot it; instead, they conveyed the frenzied pace of a pathological killing machine.
The furious tempo continues until it is time to murder the eminent Protestant philosopher Peter Ramus. Marlowe’s fictitious encounter between the aristocratic mass-murderer and the defenceless scholar lingered in the actor’s memory. Although the historical Ramus amassed enough wealth to endow several professorships, Marlowe wanted another poor scholar in this part. Marlowe’s Ramus pleads poverty when the Duke’s gang extorts his money: ‘All that I have is but my stipend from the King / Which is no sooner receiv’d but it is spent’ (ix.18–19). The Guise rehearses the standard Catholic charges against Ramus. He is a generalist, ‘having a smack in all / And yet didst never sound anything to the depth’ (24–25), disrespectful of Aristotle and reductive. This characterization is eerily reminiscent of Dr Faustus, the base-born scholar who turns from Ramism to conjuring, and fails to ‘sound the depths’ of what he would profess. This Ramus turns out to be just another harmless academic. Who else would worry that ‘one Scheckius takes it ill, / Because my places, being but three, contains all his’ (43–44) during his final seconds on earth? He dies for the crime of being an over-educated plebeian: ‘“Why suffer you that peasant to declaim?… Ne’er was there collier’s son so full of pride.” Kills him.’ (53–55)
The second half of The Massacre bears a strong generic resemblance to Marlowe’s tragedy of Edward II. The analogy between the two sodomite kings was still in the air. Henri’s tragedy begins when the newly crowned monarch assures his minions that he will continue to hold them in his heart: ‘As now you are, so shall you still persist, / Removeless from the favours of your King’ (xiv.21–22). While Henri takes up Edward’s part, Gaveston, Spencer and Baldock metamorphose into Epernoun, Mugeroun and Joyeux; Mortimer becomes the Guise; and the young Edward III finds his counterpart in the Protestant King of Navarre. Marlowe suppressed Henri’s queen (the Isabella figure) and assigned the part of Guise’s confidant and lover to the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici. League pamphleteers related that Henri presided over a veritable Court of Sodom. One reported that ‘The king fucks his mignons, / Makes them his bedmates.’ Another alleged that the king failed to beget children because ‘he really does not tend that way’.
14.3 Henri III as a hermaphrodite. From Thomas, Sieur d’Embry, Les hermaphrodites, 1605.
Marlowe unites the massacre of 1572 and the civil mayhem of 1586–88 in the master image of a slaughterhouse. The assassin who shoots Admiral Coligny reappears to gun down Mugeroun. The Admiral and the Guise are beguiled into their respective places of execution with promises of safekeeping. A steady stream of victims continues to be shot, stabbed, strangled and poisoned by jocose, blaspheming assassins. The later massacre differed from the earlier one with respect to the rank and religion of the victims. The killers of 1572 sought to extirpate the entire race of French Protestants. The murderous outbreak of 1586–88 amounted to gang warfare between the rival Catholic factions headed by the king and the Guise. Neither side was likely to draw much sympathy from an English audience. What was at stake for the playwright in these events?
The Massacre does not merely publicize the importance of good intelligence work. Marlowe’s tragedy also advertises his own qualifications to perform such work. For the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, he relied on a single, widely read pamphlet, Francis Hotman’s pro-Protestant True and Plain Report of the Furious Outrages of France. When he reached the mid-1580s, however, Marlowe became a source in his own right. He had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of the feud between King Henri III and the Guise. Much of the factual material in the latter part of The Massacre can only be verified by recourse to confidential sources in the State Papers. Marlowe obtained this information by word of mouth, from men who had been witness to these events. In contrast to the partisan accounts of Protestant and Catholic pamphleteers, he gives an even-handed, densely factual report on the feud. The brief documentary scenes that succeed one another in The Massacre at Paris resemble diplomatic dispatches; these were the raw materials of intelligence fieldwork.
14.4 The assassination of the Duke of Guise. The assassins draw their swords on the right, stab the Duke in the centre, and drag away his body on the left.
The dying Henri III had summoned the foreign ambassadors to witness the transfer of his monarchy to the King of Navarre. In the pamphlets, the king sends for ‘the heads of strangers’; at the same moment in The Massacre he says, ‘Go call the English agent’ (xxiv.49). Someone told Marlowe that on this occasion William Lyly, second in command at the English embassy, had stood in for the absent ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford. The author was in the know. His dramatization of Henri’s final testament includes at least one detail that appears only in Lyly’s confidential report to Queen Elizabeth about the assassination. Marlowe’s Henri addresses his dying words to Elizabeth via the English agent at his bedside: ‘Agent for England … / Tell her, for all this, that I hope to live’ (55–57). Another detail found its way to Marlowe from King Henri’s circle of intimates. Guillaume Girard’s Life of the Duke of Epernon, the Great Favourite of France (1655, translated 1670), written by Epernon’s personal secretary, is the only firsthand account of Henri’s death that includes the king’s dying remark to his favourite: ‘I hope God will give me the grace soon to be reveng’d on them.’ Marlowe had heard this story:
Ah, Epernoun, is this thy love to me?
Henry thy King wipes off these childish tears,
And bids thee whet thy sword on Sixtus’ bones,
That it may keenly slice the Catholics.
(xxiv.96–99)
The Massacre is itself a memorial reconstruction of what happened during the violent transition from Henri III to Henri IV. Marlowe’s last tragedy concludes with the new monarch, the Huguenot King Henry of Navarre, rattling his sabre at the Pope and vowing to avenge his predecessor’s murder. English Protestants hoped that the emergent Bourbon monarchy signalled the end of the Catholic League. Such expectations proved ill founded. King Henri III’s cry for vengeance went unanswered. As Henri IV made his peace with the League, the threat of more assassination plots intensified anxiety about religious unrest in England.
Marlowe’s earlier tragedies sublimate and project the anxieties that attend upon religious violence. The Massacre at Paris is his ‘tell-all’ play. It thrusts the audience into the middle of an historic débâcle and leaves them there. The theme of cultural crisis is familiar from Marlowe’s earlier work; the author’s immersion in the historical particulars of his subject is new. A full, authorial text might well offer a more literary treatment of the atrocities at Paris. To judge simply from what the actors remembered, Marlowe was evolving away from the stage and towards a more direct confrontation with the history of his own times.
The Massacre at Paris opened during a period of rising mortality rates. Lord Strange’s Men took in £3 14s for the first performance on 26 January – it was their best gate since the reopening of the playhouses a month previously. But the fledgling winter season had nearly run its course. When the weekly death toll fro
m the plague exceeded thirty, as it did by the end of January, the authorities shut down the playhouses. The plague of 1593 was the worst outbreak in thirty years; it would claim eight per cent of the London population and take a dire toll on Marlowe’s extended family in Canterbury. Marlowe found refuge at Scadbury, where he worked on Hero and Leander. Other storms were rising as well, and Marlowe was in their path.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In the Theatre of God’s Judgements
Queen Elizabeth herself was said to have pronounced Christopher Marlowe’s death sentence (‘prosecute it to the full’) at court. A few days later, Marlowe died from a puncture wound above the eye in the nearby home of a genteel widow. The Queen’s Coroner attributed the killing to a quarrel over ‘the reckoning’, a bill for food and drink, but many have long suspected that the murderer had ulterior motives. Was Marlowe dispatched in an act of sovereign power or in a tavern brawl? Was he guilty – and if so, of what? – or innocent?
The trouble started in London and took several months to catch up with Marlowe. On 17 February 1593 protesters carried a coffin containing the remains of the Separatist Roger Rippon from Newgate Prison to the house of Justice Richard Young in Cheapside. An inscription attached to the coffin proclaimed that Rippon was ‘the last of 16 or 17 which that great enemy of God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the High Commissioners, have murdered in Newgate within these five years’. Now, the inscription continued, ‘his blood crieth out for speedy vengeance’. The accusation struck home. Archbishop Whitgift’s Court of High Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes had been committing sectarians to Newgate for the previous two years. Prolonged incarceration in Limbo, the lower dungeon, amounted to a death sentence without a trial.